<< Kurzweil is a bright guy and a good programmer but that
hardly qualifies him to prognosticate that we (or SIs) can change the
laws of the universe. In fact if you read in detail all of the work
being done on keeping Moores Law going, it becomes clear that
we *are* getting closer and closer to the limits. And as I
point out in my MBrain discussions, the speed of light places
a fundamental limit on who "smart" you can get. Planck sizes
place fundamental limits on how small you can get. Gravity
places fundamental limits on how dense you can get before you
*disappear* from this universe.

Robert >>
Are you saying that your 'qualifier' for this discussion is limited by a
doctorate in physics? Wow! As for gravity, these *dense* matter thingies
called, black holes, seem to stick around for quite a while-astronomically
speaking--and now appear to come in different masses; which was somewhat
unexpected, theoretically. Lightspeed gets beat by non-locality, though any
useful data I have heard, is impossible. However, since Gerald Feinberg back
in 1962 postulated the existence of tachyons, maybe centuries from now
something less *dense* then what people are now may come up with a really,
decent, technology that utilizes these hypothetical particles. Maybe Freeman
Dyson's universe will ultimately get interconnected via tachyons rather the
lasers or neutrinos or whatever? The funny thing is that somehow, I suppose,
there is just a lot more information, in the cosmos, waiting to be uncovered
and some of that information will be good news for humans and our descendants.
Mitch